The present invention relates generally to social network services, and more particularly to providing users of a social network service the ability to selectively designate content with varying levels of accessibility. As used herein, a “user” can be an individual or an entity (such as a business or third party application). The term “connection” refers individuals and entities with which a user of the social networking service may form a connection, association, or relationship.
Conventionally, users of social networking services can post content that they wish to enable and/or encourage others to view. The content may include text, status updates, location information, photos, videos, groups, events, and links to external websites as well as other pages in the social network, just to name a few. Content posted by a user is then made available to the user's connections via one or more of various communication channels in the social network, such as a newsfeed or stream.
While the streams in a social network efficiently make content available to a user's connections, the user cannot control the accessibility of the posted content on a granular level. As a user becomes connected with more and more people on the social network over time, the user may wish to target certain content to a subset of his or her connections, or may wish to specifically exclude certain connections from viewing the uploaded content entirely. In addition, a user may not want to inundate all of the user's connections with numerous content items that may be irrelevant to many of them. Conventional social networking services lack a content upload and delivery mechanism that enables users to control the accessibility of the content generated on the social network on a granular level. As a result, users are reluctant to upload certain content to the social network freely because of the lack of granular control of the accessibility of that content.